Energy Pipeline: Zedi Solutions’ new Greeley office to handle will handle one fifth of U.S. lab production for company

Zedi Solutions was founded in Canada 30 years ago. It made its debut in the U.S. in 2011 with an acquisition of Louisiana company, Southern Flow. Zedi has 28 locations in North America, 19 of which are in the U.S., and they have 220 employees.

Oil and gas technology company, Zedi Solutions, moved their Colorado offices from outside of Denver to Greeley and held a grand opening ceremony Aug. 3 for city leaders to get to know them. The mayor’s office and Greeley Chamber of Commerce were among the attendees when people got to get a sneak peak of the facilities and the employee culture.

“It’s a great community to be in. We’ve really found that the community has embraced our new location. We’re really happy with the support that we got,” says Larry Spagnolo, Zedi’s chief commercial officer and president of U.S. operations. “We’re also finding from an employee standpoint it’s great for employees to get to and from that location, so it’s been very well accepted by our employees.”

Zedi Solutions provides production, midstream and pipeline companies with a wide variety of services and products all brought together with innovative technologies that allow customers to manage their site production remotely. They provide the equipment and software, service for it and obtains the networks that gets the information from a well site to the user’s iPad, desktop, or iPhone.

“We have five lines of business and each of those lines of business is designed to give customers services for everything they need around production operations management of oil and gas,” Spagnolo said.

One of those services is lab work. The new Greeley office, which is four times the size of the previous one, is one of seven U.S. labs that tests gas and liquid samples for its customers and will handle one-fifth of U.S. lab production. That information is then relayed to the end user’s cellular device, iPad, or desktop so they can manage production operations remotely. It will office 20 employees including Zedi’s accounting, sales and marketing, and leadership for its lab operations. It is in the process of joining the Greeley Chamber of Commerce and will present at several municipal events.

Their software, says Spagnolo, gives customers “access to their production data anywhere, anytime, from anywhere in the world.”

By way of their 30 mobile labs, Zedi operations can obtain field samples, analyze them, and get the information in the form of reports and analytics to the end users’ dashboard within 15 minutes. It’s not uncommon in other parts of the industry for that kind of information to take days and weeks to get to a client often as an email or PDF. They monitor a network of some 1.5 million sensors across 26 countries.

The labs test the make-up of gas and liquid samples for regulatory requirements and for monetary assessment. For example, when a producer extracts gas it’s made up of different percentages of gases such as methane or butane. By understanding its make-up and the amount of high-value gases in the sample, a producer can put a more definitive price on the sample when selling it to upstream and midstream clients.

While Zedi mostly works with the oil and gas industry, they are expanding their client base, testing water for some municipalities. Also, Greeley isn’t the company’s only expansion right now; another one is in the works in Midland, Texas.

Zedi has grown significantly in the past ten years in Canada and more recently in the U.S. And Spagnolo says its future is looking good: “We’re growing tremendously in our U.S. business. It’s been very well received. There aren’t a lot of companies like us in the market. We tend to provide a full spectrum of technology and services to oil and gas and most of our competitors are much larger organizations. There aren’t a lot of medium-sized organizations that tailor their services to customers that can offer everything from the technology all the way to the field service sand have 19 locations with great employees to serve them.”

Spagnolo says the three things that sets Zedi apart from their competitors is that they provide a full spectrum of services, their customers come first in everything they do, and their employees are their No. 1 customers.

Employees are surveyed every quarter and they have a 91 percent employee satisfaction rate with very low turn over. Spagnolo, who started with Zedi six years ago as vice president of sales and customer service, believes that making employees a priority means they take care of customers similarly.

“Our philosophy is our employees are our first set of customers. We communicate with them. I think we’re a very transparent and motivating organization and it’s a very engaging workforce, and if you have that then their going to take care of their customers, because lots of companies have services, but I think we’ve got a very unique mix where we have great services, but we also have a great team supporting our customers and I think that’s what makes us unique,” explains Spagnolo.